Risky discourses: promiscuously storying women's lives

Risky discourses: promiscuously storying women's lives

PANEL PRESENTATION ABSTRACT
We, seven
women
writers
performers
artists
academics,
have been working collectively for a year,
storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives.
 
We write to ‘taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect’ (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 2000), to take the ‘risky’ steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998).
 
Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives we didn’t choose or imagine, but the lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning.

For our panel discussion we come together from different physical locations and different spaces in the field of education to make public our stories and their promiscuous forms (Childers et al, 2013). We contemplate the conscious de-disciplining (Richardson, 2000) of our practice which we express using performance, tableaux, and voice to further extend women’s imagistic ways of knowing and communicating (Langer, 1942).

References:
Nin, A. (1976). In favor of the sensitive man, and other essays. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Childers, S., Rhee, J., and Daza, S.L. (2013). Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: The dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26 (5), 507 – 523. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2013.786849

Langer, S. K. (1942). Philosophy in a new key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Palmer, P.J. (1998) The courage to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed. pp. 923 – 948). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Oral presentation. Abstract only published.